Data from numerous traffic monitors shows that numbers dropped considerably in Syria on Tuesday evening (May 7) as a civil war continues to rage throughout the country.
Google’s Transparency Report backs up the claims, as its web traffic tumbled to zero. Other companies including Umbrella Security Labs and Akamai are reporting similar falls in traffic.
“On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” Umbrella’s chief technology officer Dan Hubbard wrote in a blog spot.
“Although we can’t yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fibre cuts and power outages.”
Due to the blackout, Google has reopened its ‘Speak to tweet’ service that allows people with a phone line to leave messages that can be accessed by people outside the country via the Twitter account @speak2tweet. The service was created in 2011 as similar outages occurred during the uprising in Egypt.
It is not the first time that Syria has been cut off from the internet. A previous outage in November 2012 saw the country cut off for around two days.